The widespread use of smartphones and cell-based WIFI hotspots has led to an explosion in signaling and data traffic on cellular networks. One way to manage this explosion is to identify and address applications that overuse the data network. There are current solutions that monitor network usage on a per-device basis, but these solutions suffer from the challenge of correlating whole-device usage to single application usages.
While there are some solutions that can monitor per-application network loading at the network layer, the data includes traffic that is internal to the phone (e.g., application-to-application traffic). Thus, their measurements of network traffic are skewed upwards by the inclusion of internal-device traffic and can create false positives when identifying network-abusive applications. These solutions also suffer from an inability to distinguish between applications that are responsible for downloaded network traffic (incoming traffic).